


Let's Chat...

by imaginarycircus



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: F/M, Feels, remember these jerks?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 16:24:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1864491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginarycircus/pseuds/imaginarycircus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ficlet written right after episode Episode 96 and obviously before 97 aired. Darcy returns Lizzie's message.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let's Chat...

**Author's Note:**

> Someone reblogged this on tumblr where I originally posted it and totally forgot about it. I thought it was decent enough to post over here.

Darcy is in a budget meeting, a tense one because Crawford and his sister are having their usual argument about expenditures with Bertram. Usually Darcy is adept at diffusing this tension, Usually, but his phone buzzes next to his tablet. Lizzie’s face pops up. She’s standing next to a pile of lobsters. It’s his favorite photo of her from _that_ day because it’s the only one he took with his phone. It’s not the one that GiGi posted on Twitter. Instead of Lizzie’s long suffering fake grin, she looks pensive. He has no idea what she was thinking, but he loves the look of her lost in thought.

He spends the next seven minutes regretting that he didn’t just walk out of the room and answer the call, but he’s too professional for that and he wouldn’t insult his co-workers that way.

But he hasn’t heard a word anyone has said and Crawford looks like he’s going to lunge across the table and throttle Bertram. Mary is looking at him pleadingly to intervene.

"All right. I think we should take a short break. Does anyone object?" Darcy rubs his temples and it’s as close as he’d ever come to admitting he has a headache. Everyone assents and Darcy launches himself out the door and ducks into the nearest possible private space, which happens to be a janitorial closet.

He listens to her message and he has no idea what she’s saying because he is just listening to the sound of her voice. He replays it and her tone is awkward and nervous. He can hear her cringing. He plays the message a third time to understand what she’s actually saying. She wants to talk to him. He feels light headed, but that might be the chemical fumes in the small closet.

He hits dial and his fingers are very steady—the rest of him is not. The phone rings five times before she answers.

"Hi?"

"Lizzie." There are a lot of other things he wants to blurt out and he knows he can’t say any of them right now. Not yet, or possibly ever. He sits down on a box because all his internal organs seem to have vanished and you have to sit down when that happens.

"Um… how are you? Wait. I’m sorry. Are you busy? What am I saying? Of course you are. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called, at least not in the middle of the day. You’re always in meetings and I should have thought—"

"Lizzie, it’s all right. I’m glad you called. I do want to er, chat. May I call you this evening?"

"Oh, yeah. Sure."

They, neither of them, know what to say so there is an extended silence. It’s the loveliest non-sound Darcy has ever heard.

The closet smells like embalming fluid (you don’t want to know why he knows what that smells like.) His nose is burning. He’s hiding in a dark closet listening to Lizzie breathe. Lizzie makes his well ordered life weird and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t grateful for that chaos.

"I really thought we’d switched to environmentally friendly cleaners." Why would he say that? He could have said, "I love you." or "I haven’t been able to sleep because I can’t stop thinking about you." He’s never been good at sharing his feelings, but this is a new low. Darcy pulls the cord on the light and it flickers to life, shedding faint greenish light.

"What are you talking about? Darcy where are you?"

"Well. I… " He clears his throat. "I ducked into the first private place I came across, which happens to be a janitorial supply closet."

Darcy blinks. His eyes are tearing up because of the fumes, which relieve grit that’s beneath his eyelids.

"Oh." Lizzie pauses and he imagines her cocking her head and frowning in confusion. He doesn’t blame her.

"Call me when you’re free later and do it from somewhere unlikely to poison you, maybe?" She’s trying to joke, but she sounds actually concerned for his health.

"Yes. All right."

"You’re not going to leave the closet until I hang up, are you?"

Darcy doesn’t need to agree.

"Thank you," she says. There is a world of meaning wrapped up in those two words. "Darcy, I’m hanging up now so you don’t die."

Click.

He likes that they didn’t say goodbye. This conversation is not over—it’s just paused.

He snaps a picture of the label on the cleaning supplies to research later. This stuff can’t be good for anyone to breathe in, though his headache, ironically, is gone.

Fanny Price is passing the closet when he shoots out of it, nearly clothes-lining her.

"I apologize. I was um—just investigating the brand of soap we use to clean the building."

Fanny nods as if this is perfectly sensible and not at all insane. She’s always enormously kind. Darcy worries that she is cheating herself out of advancement in the creative group because she is so self-effacing. He makes a note to talk to Emma about that. Emma will know what to do.

Darcy floats back to the meeting on a cloud of chemical lemony bliss. He knows he shouldn’t count his chickens, or any other farm animals in potentia, but he can’t help it. He’s been waiting for a signal that she wanted anything to do with him before contacting her. He would never assume or presume with her again.

The day can’t end soon enough so he can get home and call her and hear her voice or her silence again. It’s not enough, but it’ll tide him over, because he knows it’s only a matter of time—or is that presuming? He doesn’t care. He let’s himself do something he hasn’t in a very long while. He hopes and he imagines her, with him. With him all the time and with him forever.


End file.
